


But I must gather knots of flowers and buds, and garlands gay

by marginaliana



Category: Stairway to Heaven - Led Zeppelin (Song)
Genre: Fantasy, Gen, Misses Clause Challenge, Science Fiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-30
Updated: 2014-11-30
Packaged: 2018-02-27 14:22:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,757
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2696219
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/marginaliana/pseuds/marginaliana
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She dreams of Avalon, and makes the path for herself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	But I must gather knots of flowers and buds, and garlands gay

**Author's Note:**

  * For [foxtwin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/foxtwin/gifts).



The morning sunlight stabs through the gap in the blinds and leaves a slash of white across the deep green silk of the sheets. The room is filled with cool, still air. Karen wakes with a gasp, sweat prickling across her stomach and in the crooks of her elbows. After a taut moment she rolls over, scrabbling in the drawer of the bedside table for a scrap of napkin and a pen. She writes the symbols out just as she'd seen them, nine pairs of circled groupings, and then the words between, nine lines of what might be called poetry.

When it's done she sets the pen down with a click and slumps back against the sheet, paper still clenched between her thumb and forefinger, wondering if anyone will believe her. Wondering if she believes herself.

\----

The first time she dreams of Avalon it is August. She goes to bed late, with a stack of patent license agreements and the company's annual financial reports in her hand, alone – no different from any other night.

She wakes in the forest. It is a thick and verdant wood, filled as far as her eye can make out with shades of green and earth brown, a spatter of red berries on a bush. At her feet a brook burbles past, water slipping over mossy stone until it disappears behind a stand of reeds. It's narrow enough that she could step across it if she wished to. Sunlight glitters through the trees, dancing over the surface of the water. The air is warm but not hot, soft on her skin.

A bird alights with a flutter of wings in the tree whose branches overhang the brook. Its song is piercing, high and sweet, and something inside her eases at the sound of it. She breathes out.

\-----

It's hard not to notice the sharp silence in the way all the scientists stop taking abruptly when she comes into the conference room, but she's used to it. The lab head hates her – the sort of hate some men reserve for women in positions of power, or who don't want to fuck them, both of which she qualifies for – but he generally knows what he's doing and she's prepared to put up with a lot of shit in exchange for competence. She slides the piece of paper into the center of the table.

"Does this mean anything to you?"

Chris leans over it, doesn't give it more than sixty seconds' contemptuous consideration. "Where did you get this, a mental patient?" He pushes the paper away across the table. "We should be brainstorming our next line of attack with the electromagnetic output, not wasting time with this bullshit, you know."

Karen opens her mouth, a retort at the ready, but someone else speaks before she can do more than breathe in. 

"It's a diagram of a quantum tunnel system, isn't it?" says Heike. She's short, dark-haired, with a Ph.D. from MIT and a string of post-graduate studies to her name. She's also the newest member of the team and the one Karen knows least well. With a quick, precise motion she rotates the piece of paper until it's facing away from her, so the others can see it. 

A moment of silence, and then another of the team, Chen, makes a thoughtful noise. "You think those are quarks?"

"Yeah. Up, down," she points at two of the symbols, "and so on. The text could be an arrangement sequence and a medium."

"In pairs?"

"Maybe. Or four triads? Need to test it."

Now Chen is beginning to nod, and so are a few of the others. 

Karen swallows her excitement. "Can you build it?" All the scientists sit back in their chairs. 

"Even if this isn't the product of some fruitcake's imagination," says Chris, "build it to what end? Where's the monetization?" 

She ignores him entirely, even when he starts to sputter, and keeps her eyes on Heike and the others. "Can you build it?" she says again.

Slowly Heike nods. "I think it could be done. You'd need a dedicated team of, say, fifteen? Perhaps five months to build. Expensive, though. And no idea if it'd do anything, mind. Might just—" She makes a gesture. "Spin."

"All right," Karen says. "All right. You're in charge of the project." Heike doesn't startle at this, which Karen notes with approval. "I want a budget estimate and a rough timeline by next Friday. Yes?"

"Yes."

"Good." 

Chris is still sputtering. Karen gets up and leaves without looking back.

\-----

The third time she dreams of Avalon, it is September. The nights are beginning to get cold; a plush blanket has been added to the pile of silk on her bed. The company's revenue for the quarter has taken a sharp downturn from projections and there are negotiations for two possible acquisitions on the table, neither of which she's sure about. Numbers blur into numbers until her eyes sting with exhaustion.

This time when she wakes in the forest, the trees are thinner, slim spruce and pine. She follows the line of them up, up, until they taper to nothing against the brightness of the sky. Two pale rings of smoke drift across the blue.

For lack of anything else to do, she walks in the direction of the smoke. The forest is quiet but for the hushed sound of her footsteps across the carpet of pine needles, the waves of wind in the trees. A few minutes later she finds herself in a clearing. There are people here: young and old, women and men, all dressed in the same ashen, un-dyed robes. When she is close enough they all tip their heads back and sing together, a wordless note that makes the whole forest ring. She closes her eyes.

\-----

The quantum tunnel project divides the department. Karen refuses to micromanage – and is far too busy with the acquisition she's decided to pursue besides – but she can't miss the mutterings in the elevator or the fact that Chris has sent her three increasingly pointed memos about good use of resources. As far as she can tell, Heike makes no attempt to convince the others, just does what she's been asked to do quietly and efficiently. The project estimates arrive in Karen's inbox at three thirty-five Friday afternoon. She has her assistant print everything out and bind it, but it's not until past seven on Saturday (after the charity brunch in honor of her late father, after the gym, after the urgent phone calls from the company's PR firm) that she actually gets a chance to look at the numbers.

It won't be cheap. It won't be sensible. It won't even, most likely, accomplish anything.

But she is forty two years old and it's her fucking company, and she has never failed at anything she set her mind to, so she's going to make them build it anyway.

\-----

The tenth time she dreams of Avalon it is almost November. This time she wakes at the edge of a field, glowing gold in the sun. Rolling hills lay spread out before her, neat rows of furrows divided by dark stone walls and hedges. A piper's song echoes across the distance, rich and clear, almost as if it is calling her. She takes a step towards it, and another, and another. 

She walks across the fields for what might be hours, following the sound of the music. There are berries in the hedges, bursting with sweet tang in her mouth. There are sheep, wet-nosed and curious.

When she gets close enough, she can hear the echo of laughter among the music, the bustle of dancing. At the top of the next hill she can see them down in the valley – girls and boys all dressed in white, adults in bright colors. A tall pole, fluttering with ribbons, stands in the middle of the crowd. There are flowers everywhere. Someone sees her, and all the children run towards her, shouting, "The May Queen, the May Queen!"

A little girl brings her a crown of flowers and she kneels down to let the girl place it on her head. When she stands again, the crowd whistles and shouts with approval. Somehow, without speaking of it, they scatter into a circle around the pole and all join hands; the hand in her left is small, callused, worn; the hand in her right is large and smooth. 

The piper breaks into a jolly tune and the dance begins. They circle left, circle right, pull in close and then spread so far apart that they can barely hang on to each other. There is a song about sleeping bears, a song where everyone has to imitate animal noises, a song where a young boy dresses up as an old woman. She dances and dances until she is laughing too hard to stop.

\-----

It is late January, and the acquisition is almost finished. They have submitted the paperwork for approvals from three different regulatory bodies, have prepared press releases and employment contracts. Revenue is up in the first quarter, at least so far. Heike's team have split off to a new department for the quantum tunnel project, and they've hired ten more people. Karen knows the inside of her conference room better than her bedroom now. She has taken to looking west, when she can, just taking a quiet moment to stand at the full-length window in her office and watch the clouds moving against the sky. Sometimes, when the wind rushes up against the glass, she can hear the song of the piper. Sometimes she thinks it's getting louder.

Tonight she is home at sunset for the first time in weeks. There are fifteen voicemail messages on her phone, friends wanting to see her, to catch up or make dinner plans. Instead she puts a frozen dinner in the microwave and walks a little aimlessly around her apartment. The sunset washes everything red. When her feet stop walking she is by the bookcase, and she runs her finger along the spines of the books – Tolkien and Rowling and Lewis and Pratchett and Jones – slipping from one to the next with a faint scudding noise. 

There had been no one moment when she stopped reading them, put them away as childish things. She had simply had less and less time to read anything that wasn't schoolwork, at first, economics and statistics and management strategy. And then she had been working, sleepless nights and early mornings to prove herself. After that her parents' death, working harder to get herself through the grief, and then working harder still to get her own company off the ground.

Every time she'd moved apartments she'd packed the books and taken them with her, arranged them all precisely on the shelves where they gathered new dust. When she thought about them, it sometimes seemed as if they watched her, waiting for her to need them again. 

\-----

In Avalon she can dance no longer, so they set her on a throne woven of birch and flowers. The girls line up in a neat row in front of her, the sun glittering in their hair. Each of them says a verse: some carefully, some easily, some only with prompting. The only one that stays with her is this:

I sleep so sound all night, mother, that I shall never wake,  
If you do not call me loud when the day begins to break;  
But I must gather knots of flowers and buds, and garlands gay;  
For I ’m to be Queen o’ the May, mother, I ’m to be Queen o’ the May.

\-----

The machine is almost ready. In the end it has been closer to seven months than five to make it work reliably, especially without quite knowing the expected behavior, but they'd sent a mouse through yesterday and something must have worked because it hadn't come back. That night, Karen had dreamed of a little cottage in the woods and a nest of mice in the woodpile.

The acquisition has gone through without a hitch. The company they'd bought had a young guy as CFO, an up-and-comer, and Karen's training him up as her replacement. She hasn't told them what she intends to do but she knows Heike, at least, suspects the truth. Still, Heike hasn't tried to talk her out of it. Karen wonders about that, wonders if, perhaps, Heike dreams of it too.

\-----

In Avalon the recitation ends and the people scatter to their homes, gathering up bits of ribbon as they go. The only one who doesn't move is the piper, who is leant back against a dry-stacked stone wall, legs crossed at the ankles, his flute slung jauntily over one shoulder. "May Queen," he calls, and she walks over to him. "Now you are queen, will you come to stay?"

"I would," she says. "But I don't know how."

He points behind her. When she turns, the fields that she has walked across are gone. Instead the land drops away into nothingness, a broad span of sky and then clouds somewhere below. When she steps closer, she can see that leading downwards towards the cloud bank is a small stone staircase. The edges of each step have been worn into rounded curves. There are symbols carved into the ends of each step, six small figures in different combinations, and then a line of verse across between them. 

"There are two paths," says the piper. "One, you see before you."

She hears what he doesn't say. She doesn't want to wait for the other path, to leave it to chance. She stoops to touch the stone, then draws back. Some instinct tells her that to touch these stairs from above would set her on a downward path, irreversible. If she is to use them, she must come up. Instead she lets herself look her fill, memorizing the order of the symbols and the words that go with each pairing. The lowest one is only legible if she lies flat on her stomach in the dirt, leaning over the edge, but she is not afraid. 

\-----

In the parking lot, the sun is setting. It is the first of May.

Karen is wearing a plain dress, un-dyed – her one concession to sentiment. The generator whines as the machine is switched on, clearly audible despite the murmur of voices from the observing crowd of employees behind the wire safety fence. The stairway flickers into existence in front of her, more tangible at the base and wispier at the top of the ten visible steps. Each riser is precisely squared off, geometric, not much like the one it's modeled from, but that doesn't matter. The murmur of voices increases in volume, but Karen pays it little attention. She is looking to the west.

"I'll let you know when we're set." Heike's quiet voice is one that Karen has come to rely on over the past week, especially when it seemed like literally everyone else only wanted to shout at her about it. Chris had resigned from the company in disgust and taken a few others with him. Someone had managed to inform the media, too, despite the company's nondisclosure agreements. The new CEO will have a nice time suing someone over it, Karen is sure. She stopped listening to voicemail three days ago, hasn't bothered to read the newspapers. 

Heike moves competently from one monitor to the next, checking the settings. Her team has tested the quantum field as much as they could. They're pretty sure it goes somewhere, but they don't know where. Karen knows, but she hasn't told them. 

Maybe she is as mad as they all say. But if so, the madness is her own and she'll be damned if she's going to give it up.

"Ready?"

She nods. She is not afraid.

"All right. You are go."

She puts her foot on the first stair. It's feels as solid as stone. A second step, and she is no longer touching earth. Someone gasps. She doesn't look down. She takes another step, and then another, faster as she rises up and up. 

 

From the ground, the sunset seems to bathe her in white light. She is thinning at the edges, like mist, though the shadow stretched out behind her is heavy and dark across the pavement. When she reaches the ninth step she pauses just for a moment, and then between that step and the next her body glimmers and is gone.

**Author's Note:**

> The verse is from [The May Queen by Tennyson](http://www.bartleby.com/360/3/181.html).
> 
> Many thanks to implicated2 for the beta.


End file.
